Greyscale to Colour Problem (With Diagram)

[Sarith]

Would be really happy if somone could help my get around this. Edit: I think what I'm trying to say is 'I want to be able to take my mid tone away' How can I colour my creature without the background being the same colour and without me manually colouring in because that would take so long and look horrible, going over every line.

[Sarith]

It's been 2 days, anyone gonna help?

[Mike D]

Not sure if this is any help to you or not, but I'll give you what I do when I go Grey > color.

By looking at your process it looks like it's moving in the right direction, just needs a couple more steps added on to the end.

For me I start the same, just a sketch where I do my rendering. Then I'll use usually Overlay, Color or Multiply to fill in my base colors. This is where you looked to have stopped. I don't use just one color, I'll vary the colors a bit depending on light sources and if I want to throw in some random colors.

Once I feel the colors are looking as well as I can get them. I'll throw another layer on top and this is where I'll start rendering and blending opaquely on top of all the other layers.

And finally finishing touches once the painting is as good as I can get it, adjustment layers, specular lights shadows.

Just looks like you need to add another couple phases to your process.

** Here is something I did a couple weeks ago where I went grey to color.
Granted there were quite a few steps between them, but in any case that's the before and after.
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showpost.php?p=2788043&postcount=45

[Sarith]

Okay thanks alot for your post. I have another question however that would really help me if you could answer it. Turns out really my question was: 'Is there an more effeicent, less messy way of colouring in greyscale that manually going and and bloacking out the coklour in entire shape of the character.

Having the greyscale image, as you have, did you then go in the just manually colour in with a hard brush, almost like tracing it all out?

To me that seems so messy and undefinied, how do you get all of the little bits? especially if your style is messier.

[Slade_Templar]

That's the painting part.

The grayscale+overlay layers are just your plan. You may not have to cover everything, but its likely you will cover most of the image with your new 'paint' top layer (where you are painting with actual colors).